


(sleep) in spite of thunder

by Casylum



Series: ere the set of sun [2]
Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: Gen, Pre-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-07
Updated: 2018-01-07
Packaged: 2019-03-01 14:12:52
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,675
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13296567
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Casylum/pseuds/Casylum
Summary: Jack Morrison wakes up—"comes to" might be a more accurate description—bloody, bleeding, and alone, in Angela Ziegler's kitchen, and doesn't know how he got there.





	(sleep) in spite of thunder

**Author's Note:**

> >   
>  Then live, Macduff: what need I fear of thee?  
> But yet I'll make assurance double sure,  
> And take a bond of fate: thou shalt not live;  
> That I may tell pale-hearted fear it lies,  
> And sleep in spite of thunder.
> 
> —MacBeth, Act IV, Scene i
> 
>  
> 
> The working title of this was "why do I keep blowing this man up", and is partially based off a conversation I had with [fugitives](http://archiveofourown.org/users/fugitives).
> 
> Many thanks to [mckoi](http://archiveofourown.org/users/mckoi) for her patience and excellence as a beta.

Jack Morrison wakes up—"comes to" might be a more accurate description—bloody, bleeding, and alone, in Angela Ziegler's kitchen, and doesn't know how he got there.

He knows how he got here, to Tangiers, where this particular low, worn group of flats is clinging, almost haphazardly, to the rise of a low hill: there had been reports, low-level chatter that somehow managed to filter its way down to him, halfway across the world in Guadalajara. The underground was rumbling with stories about damp concrete, wet blood, and endless screams echoing in the dark, topped off with talk of a bunch of overdressed, ultra-violent freaks going in and out of the business district at all hours of the day and night.

Jack, as an overdressed ultra-violent freak himself, almost took offense, but even he couldn't ignore the signs when they were laid out for him, especially when they all screamed Talon with the subtlety of a sixty-foot neon sign. Normally, he'd let it go; North Africa had its own vigilante, and Shrike went after Talon outposts here as hard as he did in Central America, but—

—but.

Angela had moved to Tangiers after Switzerland, as far away from the cold of the mountains and the ashes of HQ as she could possibly get while still being able to be on call for most of two continents. She'd built a life, one he'd kept tabs on even as he continued to keep himself from her and everyone else from before. If Talon were making a move into Tangiers, he owed it to her to try and stop them, to preserve one last modicum of peace.

The way it went, he reasoned, was that he owed her his life; the least he could do was make sure she was able to hold on to hers. He'd have--and had--done the same for Gabe, and the fact that he hadn't succeeded when it truly counted was a large part of the reason he was still hanging around central Mexico.

So he'd hopped on a cargo plane going nowhere fast, and gone down, as he was wont to do, among the mud, sand, and clinging muck, waded through what felt like miles of sewer water, made friends with several rats, and found nothing. For three nights in a row. No agents, no equipment, no traps, no sign of human habitation whatsoever. Which, in a city known for its tunnels and hidden-away-places, was a sign in and of itself.

Someone, he had concluded, had been keeping the underground clear. After that, it had just been a matter of checking all the major tunnels and caverns in the area, seeing which ones had been purged, and working backwards from there.

Tracking them down—and the them were definitely Talon, or someone doing a dangerously accurate impersonation—turned out to be the easy part, the trail leading to a house on the northwest side of town, three stories of flat, whitewashed stone overlooking the ocean. They moved people brazenly through the red-painted double doors that served as the front entrance, everyone dressed in flowing, light-weight clothes, as if they belonged here, as if they'd never been anywhere else. He saw smiling young men, serious old women, and once, out of the corner of his eye, a tall, black-haired girl who looked enough like Amélie Lacroix to make his chest ache.

The other things—the weapons he's here for, the drugs and people he suspects them of running—all that and more were sent through the back entrance, a solid metal door set into foot-thick concrete a block down and behind the house, with what he could only assume was a tunnel connecting the two.

Jack watched the house and its occupants for a few weeks, kept track of their movements, schedules, made timetables, and cursed Talon for being so fucking efficient. He much preferred the usual brand of criminal, the ones who couldn't be bothered to work out an A-Side/B-Side schedule for their henchpeople, let alone set up a full-time, 24/7 operation that never had to take breaks for day jobs.

Tonight—he's going to assume it was still tonight—had been different: the regular flow of people to-and-fro had become a torrent, one that reeled back on itself as darkness crept its way towards the ocean. By nightfall, the whole of the Talon operation Jack had so painstakingly observed had been inside the house, the red double-doors locked behind them.

To anyone with sense, it was a bad sign: no one consolidates an operation like that unless they're either in serious trouble, or so confident in their superiority that the need for concern is functionally nonexistent. Either way the wind blows there, a voice that sounded suspiciously like Ana Amari's had whispered in his head, violence is sure to follow.

Luckily—or unluckily, as it were—no one's ever accused Jack of being possessed by an overabundance of sense when it comes to keeping himself out of harm's way.

He had taken advantage of the sudden withdrawal to prowl around in the open, check approaches and access points he'd previously only been able to see from a distance, the task of dodging automated security much easier than the human, unpredictable kind. Looking back, it was almost worrisome, how routine it felt, as if he should have had Gabe's voice in his ear, Lena laughing next to him, and a God Program waiting around the corner, Talon not even a whisper in the wind.

The odd echo of familiarity had put him just ever so slightly off kilter. Not much, but enough that when a kid had rounded the corner, twitchy from the black market mods glowing a dull green from the skin on the back of her hands and the side of her head, gun tapping against her fraying jeans, he'd forgotten to dodge, expecting the muffled boom of Ana's rifle instead of the sharp crack of an un-silenced semi-auto.

It's a stupid mistake, made by the greenest of recruits and apparently grey-haired old men susceptible to old memories, one that leaves him flat on his back, bleeding and blurry-eyed, staring up at a ragged patch of pitch-black sky.

~~~

But why he's here, in a fourth floor apartment he's not supposed to know about, belonging to a woman who thinks he died almost a decade ago, that he can't say.

Habit, maybe? After the events in Ukraine, where Gabe'd nearly died and Angela had pulled them out ahead of a missile strike that hadn't cared whether or not they'd been in the crossfire, he'd always gone to Angela when he was broken in a physical sense, Gabe when the problem was a bit more mental, and both of them whenever he could swing it.

He thinks he remembers Gabe, his presence echoing through the memory of the alley and the staccato twitch-twitch-twitch of the kid's finger on the trigger of her gun. Jack can almost hear the rough rasp of his voice on late nights, that particular note of exasperation that infused his voice, the unexpectedly raucous laugh that only Angela and Jesse McCree could pull out of him, the corners of his eyes disappearing in a mass of crow's feet.

Except that can't be right, must be a memory from somewhere else, even if he can't say 'this happened in HQ', 'that's from Basic', or 'when we went to Japan, just the three of us, and came back with a cyborg ninja with daddy issues.' He can't remember Gabe ever telling him 'God damn it, Morrison, you're supposed to be dead,' can't remember him ever looking quite as bad as the spectre his mind has conjured up--dirty, angry, and years older than Gabe ever got the chance to be--and insists on calling real.

Gabe's beyond him now, Jack knows that at least, no matter what his blood-loss addled brain thinks. He's dead and gone, his atoms spread through the charred and rotting remains of the basement of the old HQ, which leaves only Angela, Jack, and the ghost of what they once were.

So maybe his body had walked itself, independent of his mind, up through the winding twist of streets and alleys, pulled inexorably towards the one place it’d been able to label as ‘safe’, no matter that he’d only ever traced the route on the battered map he’d bought from a market stall, still—after all these years—afraid of getting too close

~~~

Jack's dully aware of the fact that he’s bleeding out, thick tendrils of darkening red spreading out against the blue-and-white of the Spanish that lines Angela's kitchen floor. There's five points of sharp pain on his shoulder—four in front and one behind—as well as a hole somewhere in his gut, a through-and-through that'd come in somewhere around his lower intestines and ripped its way up before exiting through his spleen. Or kidneys, he's not sure.

Not that it matters, since—barring a miracle, which have been a little short on the ground since Switzerland—he'll probably be dead within the hour.

He's almost sorry for that—not that he'll die, which, honestly, he's dodged that bullet too many times already, but rather that he'll leave a mess behind in Angela's home, and she'll be forced, once again, to clean up after him. He'd leave if he could, tip his almost-corpse over on the morgue steps to save the ambulance drivers a trip, but he'd lost feeling in his legs a few minutes ago, and besides: it's nice here, where he is.

Time passes. He's not sure how much. The light coming from the window shifts from the orange of the streetlamps to the grey warmth of the incoming dawn, the clouds scudding across his patch of sky picking up hints of gold and pink. The tiles beneath him glisten, white and dulling red, as his vision starts to fade.

The birds out in the trees lining the street start to sing as a key turns in the lock.

**Author's Note:**

> Timeline-wise, this is set pre-Recall, post-Golden Age, as Talon starts its rise. It runs on the same assumptions that govern _in thunder, lightning, or in rain_ (the first fic in this series).
> 
> My apologies to the city of Tangiers: I've never been, but it seems like a lovely place, instead of an almost wretched hive of budding Talon activity conveniently located on the west coast of North Africa.


End file.
